A welcome addition to the neighborhood
Into the restaurant desert that is Bissonnet between West University Place and downtown Bellaire comes Enoteca Rossa, one of those capable neighborhood spots that immediately seems right for its audience.
For one thing, it’s Italian, a sure draw in our city.
For another, with its warm brick and stucco interior, it is handsome and convivial enough to suit the prosperous suburban burghers who flock there by day and by night: hoisting a cup of espresso or a glass of Italian wine at the bar, which has counter seats and high communal tables; downing pizza and pasta with the tween-age kids; toasting each other on date night in one of the high booths along the far wall.
For a third, Enoteca Rossa is flexible enough to accommodate both big spenders and diners out to grab just a bite. There’s breakfast — the new big thing for upscale Houston restaurants — starting at 7 a.m. and involving both espresso drinks and house-made pastries, with a tempting bar-top case functioning as a mini-bakery. (Tick another one off on the trend
list.) In the background, a wood-fired oven flares as pizzas are shoveled in and out. (Tick yet again.)
None of this would matter if the food weren’t any good. But the menu is mostly solid, with some surprising treats lurking within a basically conservative roster. The desserts really shine. And the mostly Italian wine list is just what the dottore ordered, with sensible prices and bottles you might not expect at a neighborhood place: Verdicchio, Lugana, Pecorino, Dunarobba, a red Lacryma Christi, among others. Many are available by the glass, as they should be in an establishment billing itself as an enoteca.
Scanning the menu quickly on my first visit, I thought I had seen it all before. But I hadn’t. Linguine with little clams came not with the usual wine-butter sauce but with a delicate leek cream, a refreshing change. Sure, there was a Gulf shrimp dish, but the big shellfish came wrapped in housemade lardo rendered bronzed and crisp, a clever take on the baconwrapped shrimp Houstonians love so well.
Those shrimp would have been even better with a twist of lemon. There’s a fine line between subtlety and blandness, and the cooking here occasionally feels too muted. A big, pearly slab of red snapper Acqua Pazza was deftly pan-seared, but its splash of white wine, garlic and basil needed a little bump of acid — over and above a scatter of cherry tomatoes — to make a vivid impression. (Again, nothing that a wedge of lemon on the plate wouldn’t have solved.)
A beautifully puttogether eggplant parmigiana from the lunch menu alternated thin slices of grilled eggplant with bright tomato and molten cheese, a non-breaded style that allows the eggplant to taste more fully of itself. If only the dish had had a tinge more salt, it would rate among my local favorites. As it was, I still ate every speck, under-seasoning be damned.
The pizzas that come from that wood oven are fun to eat, with thin, softly crisped crusts and sprightly ingredients. There’s not enough character to those crusts to put these pies in the city’s first pizza tier, but they are very decent secondtier specimens. I liked the basic Margherita pie with its simple tomato-basil-mozzarella combination, and I loved the friskier Napoletana pie, which adds oregano and snappy, salty capers to the mix.
House-cured salmon came to the table in smooth, soft sheets, enough for three or four diners to share on do-it-yourself thin toasts smeared with a gently sweet lavender jelly. To my surprise, this unorthodox idea worked. Not all the starters work so well. The regulation burrata orb with cherry tomato confit was as pleasant as the panzanella salad was offputting, its tomatoes hard as a rock, its bread cubes unyielding and its black olives canned, a startling lapse in a place that seems to care about details.
Nothing about that panzanella hung together, a syndrome echoed in a curious pasta dish of house-made cappelletti stuffed with pumpkin and topped with Gulf shrimp in a pinkish “New Orleans style” butter sauce. All the elements were perfectly fine, but they kept their distance.
Not so with the tagliolini given a primavera treatment, the skinny flat ribbons tossed with precisely cut batons of vegetables right on the cusp of tender and crisp: carrot, leek, zucchini, red bell pepper and celery bathed in olive oil and basil for a lovely, fresh effect. The vegetarian in my party that night admired it as much as I did.
I’d return here just to investigate the fettuccine with a Texas-raised lamb and vegetable sauce because a simple-grilled lamb chop dish was a hit, its thin, medium-rare chops edged with rosemary and bouncing with garlicky, lemon-zested gremolata.
My guests and I gleefully fought over the bones. We did the same over our desserts. A round of Italian cream cake arrived swathed in a toasty meringue dome that hid vanilla ice cream — an individual baked Alaska variant with ribbons of tart passionfruit sauce to set off the sweetness and softness. Rhum baba was a classic version of this old-fashioned rum cake, fiercely boozy and mitigated by a big puff of whipped cream. Even the bread pudding, a dessert of which I have tired, got an interesting twist: It was made with bomboloni, the little Italian doughnuts that used to be featured on the dessert menu in their own delightful right. (Please, could they return?)
With desserts this appealing, it’s no surprise that the morning lineup of breakfast pastries is promising, too. A round of downy almond coffee cake dusted with cinnamon and powdered sugar transported me to my mother’s long-ago holiday table. I wished my cappuccino had been a little less bitter (some tweaking of machinery and timing may be in order).
Still, in a city where top-flight baked goods are only now taking off, my cake and coffee seemed like a very welcome amenity — much like this earnest new restaurant itself.